Bra

In 1986, from a group of friends in Bra led by Carlo Petrini, came the association that would become Slow Food: Bra is the world capital of food that is good, clean and fair, and every two years the Cheese festival turns its squares into the largest international event devoted to raw-milk cheeses. The sausage of Bra has an unexpected reason behind it too: it was made of beef alone so that the Jewish community of Cherasco could buy it, and a royal decree authorised the butchers of Bra to use veal in fresh sausage, the only such case in Italy. You buy it raw from the butcher, as people always have.

The town, however, was born of an abandonment. Down on the plain stood Pollentia, a Roman city on the Tanaro; on the sixth of April 402 Stilicho routed Alaric's Goths there, and from that battle its decline began: the inhabitants moved up to the safer plateau, which is the Bra of today. The circle has only recently closed, because in the neo-Gothic castle that Charles Albert had built at Pollenzo, a UNESCO site among the Savoy residences, Slow Food has installed the University of Gastronomic Sciences and the Wine Bank. In town the baroque is that of Bernardo Vittone, who gave the town hall its convex front and Santa Chiara a double pierced dome; on the hill the Zizzola, the octagonal house that is the emblem of Bra, looks out over the Roero and the Langhe, and the nineteenth-century town guide warned that behind it, on the level ground, witches once used to gather.